Micron
Technology, Inc., is one of the world's leading providers of advanced
semiconductor solutions. Through its worldwide operations, Micron manufactures
and markets DRAM, NAND flash memory, CMOS image sensors, other semiconductor
components, and memory modules for use in leading-edge computing, consumer,
networking, and mobile products.

One of the prevailing market forces affecting
all memory makers right now is that there isn't enough manufacturing capacity to
fulfill all needs.

This situation clarified with prices rising in the
2nd half of 2016.

"Not since 2000, have the memory suppliers been
in an undersupply situation" said Alan Niebel , CEO -
Web-Feet Research - whose
company publishes longtitudinal market share data for the memory market.

The
causes are complex but partly related to a prolonged cautionary approach by
memory makers with respect to investment to stave off the classic
cycle of
memory boom bust.

Changes in memory cell technology have also
played their part in leading to the current shortage of fab capacity.

In
recent years memory makers knew that there were big technology changes taking
place in the design of DRAM
and flash (the move to
3D) and in the flash market - the simultaneous transition to TLC. Until the
manufacturability of the new devices could be proven and until the market
receptiveness for them was established it just didn't make sense to rush
headlong into unquantifiable commitments.

"Industry productivity
is still low due to a condition that could be called planar overhang" said
William Tidwell, Semiconductor Analyst in his blog
Shootout
At Yokkaichi - the NAND Industry at the Crossroads on Seeking Alpha. "Planar
overhang - being the amount of planar capacity that must be converted as fast
as possible to 3D, so the company can take advantage of the denser 3D process.
Unfortunately, this conversion process from planar to 3D is basically like
buying a house that has to be completely renovated and then finding out that
load-bearing walls are involved - and the foundation has to be reinforced."

The
established wisdom is that the cure to memory manufacturing capacity problems
costs many billions of dollars and the investment risks are always high
because memory makers have to guess the product mix from their customers. This
used to be easier in the pre SSD era.

Now the cloud companies are the
leading edge computer designers (rather than the old time computer box
shifters) and the scale of disruptive change in memory design architecture
and customer usage patterns make forecasting the worldwide memory mix harder
than ever before.

Not everyone agrees that it will take billions of
dollars to increase memory fab capacity.

For example in the DRAM
market - BeSang
argues
that 3D Super-DRAM could fix he multi-billion dollar money pit of memory
industry's fab capacity roadmap and produce 4x as many die per wafer for around
$50 million.

And the memory shortage (and price hikes) will encourage
systems designers to look again at memory utilization at a systems level.

Software and
controller techniques
which incrementally do more work with less memory, or which do the same job
with cheaper memory are now more rewarding to investigate and apply. The
cloud infrastructure
companies are at the leading edge of this. Because every nuanced 15% or 20% of
more virtual service delivery goes straight to the bottom line. Whereas in
traditional user sites such small differences are below the threshold of
triggering design or supplier changes.

And another reason why there
doesn't seem to be enough memory fab capacity is that the traditional market
gaming has been made more uncertain by the impact of the China market.

"...the
multinationals can only produce a tiny percentage of China's memory needs,
prompting the government to jumpstart its own 3D NAND and DRAM efforts"
said Mark LaPedus in his blog -
China Unveils
Memory Plans.

And those weren't enough reasons to wait and see how
the simultaneous equations of memory fab capacity, device technology costs,
market mix on the demand side, and revolutionary changes in future memory
systems architecture were likely to get solved - yet another factor for Micron
to play the waiting game is that it has traditionally been a buyer of ready
made semiconductor fabs by acquiring them from distressed companies.

Since
the end of 2016 the memory industry has been waiting for clarification about
the spinoff of Toshiba's
memory and storage business units.

Micron
is one of 20 significant companies which have made product announcements
related to the SCM
DIMM wars market.

Threats and challenges for Micron from SSD
architecture?

10 years ago the big challenge for Micron and other
memory companies (discussed in this publication) was how well they would
adapt to the SSD market. It was clear before any of these companies had even
heard about the SSD market that the SSD market (and SSD systems architecture)
would one day become the biggest consumer of memory devices and
change the way
they had to do business.

The choice for Micron was - be a
commodity supplier of memory to SSD companies or move upmarket and become a
leading SSD brand.

As
you can read in the articles below - Micron's adaptation to SSDs and the
enterprise systems market in particular has been underwhelming.

At the
heart of this failure has been the lack of commitment to adopting a
software and
systems oriented
business culture coupled with depending too much on Intel to provide market
roadmaps (at a time when Intel
itself was floundering around having - too late - discovered it was no longer
in charge of where the computer market was going.)

Another component
of Micron's under response to the SSD market was I think due to doubts
that Micron would be able to make such a transition work sustainably. This
would be reinforced by seeing what had happened to other companies in the
SSD systems market with success in one or two product generations only
providing transient market leadership. And looking ahead from now the roadmap
to future
enterprise SSD consolidation is expected to be littered with even more
dead bodies.

Consolation for Micron's failure to own any leading
enterprise SSD systems brand (upto 2013 or 2014) was the fact that its DRAM
business seemed to be a beneficiary of big memory architectures. But the winds
of change were coming there too.

In 2013 the advent of the first
crude memory
channel flash SSDs suggested that the DRAM market would see threats from
flash. (But that market got mired in litigation for 2 years and due to a weak
1st generation product design it didn't set the world on fire.)

In
2014 in an article -
Are you ready to
rethink RAM? - I collected together evidence suggesting that "the
revolution in use-case-aware intelligent flash could cross over into new
enterprise DRAM architecture."

In
2015 there
was no doubt that
DIMM wars
would become a hot war with 9 vendors (now 20) announcing product intentions.
(This included Micron's desperate seeming prelaunch of 3DXpoint.)

Market researchers
predict that in the next 5 years flash based systems with memory
architecture will be capable of reducing market demands for DRAM by upto 80%
compared to past usage patterns in servers and there are already
signs
from the controller market that this tiered memory approach will trickle down
to other markets too.

So it will not be "business as usual"
for DRAM.

This is a challenge which Micron is well aware of and has
itself discussed in various public papers and conferences.

All these
challenges go back to systems and business defined answers. Because it's not
how you make the raw memory which matters any more - it's how well the memory
system and the data delivery architecture and the application software can
operate together efficiently
within a big SSD
controller context.

Editor:- June 10, 2015 - here's a summary of how I
view Micron from the enterprise SSD perspective. It's based on some
conversations with readers in May and early June 2015 re what I thought about
Micron's Storage Unit.

In the past few quarters - from my
perspective and past conversations with Micron re enterprise SSD - I rated
Micron as having a very weak direct understanding of the enterprise SSD
systems market and no real strong products apart from standard offerings which
are easily substitutable.

From the short term business perspective that weakness makes it less
risky for other SSD companies (without fabs) to do business with Micron 
because they can judge Micron is not well placed to replace them.

Micron is the only company (among the major memory and HDD companies
in the same market) which hasn't acquired any significant enterprise SSD
companies in the past 12 to 18 months. For years they didn't understand the
enterprise and they still don't have the IP or brands needed. So they should
feel strong pressure to do something. But making a big move after years of
doing nothing is risky too.

Taken together Micron's enterprise storage
strategy has not met the basic needs of Micron as a memory company. It doesn't
have any strong SSD architectures and systems roadmaps of its own.

In the quarter ended November 28,
2013 - Micron said that
about 50% of its nand
flash memory bits went
into SSDs.

Micron also reported significant growth in its server
RAM business in this
quarter.

However, in the next few years I think it's likely that this
server DRAM business will be impacted by the growing adoption of server based
flash - initially by PCIe
SSDs (a market in which Micron itself participates directly) and later
to a growing extent by
memory channel
flash SSDs in the form represented by flash DIMMs from competitor
SanDisk.

The
general effect of server based flash on server DRAM is to reduce the number of
servers required to service like for like apps and users. (SSD-CPU equivalence)

In the past few years, however, the RAM impact of this transition has
mostly been to move more RAM into fewer servers.

In the next few
years, however, flash SSDs may also begin to replace a proportion of
memory capacity which was previously done by DRAM.

But I think it's inevitable that
Micron will - at some stage in 2014 or 2015 - have to publicly address this
flash DIMM SSD accelerator product gap / opportunity / threat to maintain
confidence in its server customer base.

Possible ways of doing this
are:-

ammending the Hybrid Memory Cube architecture to support internal flash
controllers (a possibility I wrote about back in 2011)

licensing or acquiring a similar flash DIMM interface controller
technology.

developing something similar internally

launching patent lawsuits to slow down competitors

Clearing the
patent and IP decks in readiness for the above options for that may have been
one of the factors in the
December
2013 patent deal with Rambus.

In
a related conference call - Satish Rishi,
CFO - Rambus said "we haven't licensed the entire controller space...
besides DRAM, and on that side of the industry, we're looking to have more
licensees... ...Today most of our patents do not read on the interfaces for
non-volatile memory... But over time, I think that's going to change and we
expect that some of the novel technologies in the non-volatile space as the
speeds get higher will probably adopt the type of interfaces that the DRAM
industry has used. So we have a lot of upside potential." (...read
transcript)

My guess is that - Micron will be conflicted about
investing too much, too soon in memory channel SSDs for the same reasons that
hard drive vendors
originally ignored SSDs.

In the present state of the
SSD market -
Micron may regard the short term market opportunity of memory channel SSD as
- being small compared to something they already do (PCIe SSDs) and - in the
long term - as damaging to their DRAM revenue if it succeeeds.

Overriding all previous faltering (and
sometimes misdirected) steps taken by Micron in the SSD market in recent years
- the company's 2 biggest legacy achievements in the SSD market upto now were
clearly revealed in
2012. They
were:-

From
my point of view - having discussed this type of transition with many of the
world's leading memory companies years ago when SSDs were under 1% of their
customer sales and not even in their business radar - it's hard to state how
significant this is.

Some other ways you can look at it are...

Current
worldwide memory fab capacity can easily support 3x the SSD volume and
probably 10x the annual SSD capacity using already started
manufacturing processes.

Owning SSD brands is now an essential part of
forward integration for managing a successful memory business.

Memory
businesses will not be able to survive profitably without strongly estalished
and tied SSD routes to market.

That's because customers want SSDs -
not memory. And because SSD makers can switch memory suppliers more easily than
server and PC makers could switch them - the position of being outside the SSD
box as a commodity supplier of memory isn't attractive.

I had been following up a chain of SSD contacts within the
company - and I was looking forward to finally getting some useful information
about their enterprise SSDs.

I started by saying that I was
surprised that the information which is publicly available on Micron's
enterprise SSD web pages - lacks the essential data that any serious
designer would need to know in order to decide whether to shortlist Micron as a
possible supplier.

At the time I looked (in May 2012) the PCIe SSD
product datasheets - for example - didn't say anything at all about the internal
architecture - and they were light on many performance details too. I wondered
if I had been looking in the right places. To me Micron's enterprise SSD web
pages gave me a message of product intentions rather than products which were in
production and had been fully characterized.

It wasn't me. I learned
that's just the way they do things.

Ed Doller said that the company
doesn't supply the kind of detailed internal architecture information I was
asking for unless they are talking directly to a potential customer which they
have identified by their sales efforts and even in those cases the
prospects (mostly in the top tier of computer oems) would need to sign an NDA
first.

I said Micron's approach - witholding even the most basic
technical info - showed me that Micron doesn't know how to market
enterprise SSDs and that unless Micron changes the way they presented their
SSD info online they would miss out on a big chunk of the enterprise market.

I said my readers include the biggest buyers and specifiers of SSDs
and that with so many vendors in the enterprise SSD market - the designers tend
to shortlist suppliers from what they see online - because they don't have time
to talk to everyone or test more than a small number of different products.

Neither
Micron nor anyone else can compile a list of who the biggest SSD users are based
on traditional sales data. Because there are many companies which will be huge
consumers of enterprise SSDs in the online data economy which fall outside the
traditional prospects lists. These SSD users will make the first moves to
choose their SSD partners - not the other way around.

I said it's a
valid business decision to do business the way Micron was doing it. But to my
way of thinking marketing enterprise SSDs the same way as commodity memory
products - wasn't the way to maximize their business potential.

One of
these days I will have to read some blogs about diplomacy. I thought we weren't
getting anywhere but Ed Doller did confirm that they have designed their own
SSD controller architecture for use in their enterprise SSDs. And to me - it's
a safe inference is that they are also in the
DSP IP in SSD
pack too.

That means Micron is a more significant SSD IP company
than you would think simply by looking at the null data content in
their SSD web pages.

If you're thinking of designing in Micron's
enterprise SSDs - I would say - don't waste too much of your time visiting
Micron's web site - because you won't learn anything useful there. They
don't have a scalable online process of disseminating the information you need.
You'll need to talk to a real person in their SSD business - and then wait
weeks or months - depending how busy they are - to talk to a product specialist
who can answer the type of detailed technical questions - which real
enterprise SSD companies put in their public web pages. (I'm still waiting to
get my questions answered - and when I hear I'll let you know.)

But to
get the balance right Micron isn't the only semiconductor company which doesn't
know how to market systems products. That kind of thinking is built into the
DNA of many chip makers.

These antiquated oem component oriented ways
of developing business worked well in the past - but the SSD market isn't like
the PC or server market. One of the interesting things about the SSD market is
how the memory makers, and the traditional storage companies have very different
approaches to each other and also to the pure play SSD companies. There's no
right and wrong way. It's whatever gets the business to the next level. But if
you're selecting an SSD supplier - then these differences in thinking and doing
business and risk management can be more important than the exact specs and
prices of the products.

Another positive thing about Micron - is thatall
the SSD people I spoke to were very enthusiastic about the enterprise SSD market
and optimistic about the advantages Micron had in the SSD business - by
being part of a memory company.

They were surprised but not at all
offended when I said that it was only an advantage if everything worked out
right - but that the advantage of not being tied to a particular memory supplier
for designers in competing SSD companies was that they could go with
whichever memory product looked best at the time.

I think we'll be
hearing a lot more from Micron - but other enterprise PCIe SSD makers won't be
putting them at the top of their list of competitors to worry about just yet.

And
in the next level down are:- STEC
and LSI and then
another 40 or so other companies. It's a crowded market - but there's a
lot to play for.

Micron is also in the
consumer SSD market.
I told Micron's SSD marketers right at the outset of our talks that I wasn't
interested in discussing that aspect of their business because
StorageSearch.com isn't a consumer facing SSD site.

...Later:-
in an interview with another PCIe SSD company (July 24, 2012) I was asked -

what do I think will happen to the PCIe SSD market?

Will it eventually be dominated by the semiconductor companies? like Micron and
Intel - To find out what I said - ...read
the article

In February 2009 -
Micron announced restructuring plans will reduce employment at their Idaho
sites by approximately 500 employees in the near term and as many as 2,000
positions by the end of the company's fiscal year.

InJuly 2009 -
IDTannounced
it was working with Micron
to develop a commercial PCIe flash SSD for the server market. Micron had
previously tested market reaction by unveiling a prototype PCIe SSD (with
800MB/s R/W speeds) in
November 2008.

The company says its
RealSSD
P320h drive delivers upto 750K / 341K R/W
IOPS, and
3GB/s / 2GB/s R/W throughput. It uses Micron's own 34nm SLC ONFI 2.1 NAND
flash and has on-board
RAM cache.
Micron says it manufactures most of the chips used in the new cards a
customized SSD controller.

In January 2013 -
Micron
disclosed that in the past quarter SSDs had become 17% of Micron's nand
business and the company estimates that
35% of the nand flash it supplies to trade customers end up in SSDs.

In
July 2015
- Intel began unveiling a
new future memory technology co-developed with
Micron - called
3DXpoint.

"I would be the last
person to say this isn't a cyclical business because the one thing that
suppliers will never be able to control is the demand environment and as you
know we're in a very capital-intensive business.

So, once you have the capacity then almost no circumstances will you
choose not to produce because you have a very, very high fixed cost structure
and so the industry responded appropriately to the weakening PC demand
environment and first nobody added capacity, and secondly, we all shifted our
output to those more lucrative segments... "

I
- like others - stated my doubts about the so-called market readiness hinted at
in the early 3DXPoint razzmatazz. And this year those early doubts have been
salami sliced by successive analysis as more technical information has
emerged or failed to emerge in support of the early bold claims.

This
new blog by Paul Alcorn
includes a nicely judged narrative and brings the story of the successive
pilot show teasers up to date. Among other things Paul says:-

"unfortunately,
the two companies recently began walking the performance claims back."

"...the
companies have yet to explain, beyond ECC tuning, why the endurance
specifications have taken such a drastic plunge."

"The
ultimate goal of the next generation of memory is to have the worlds of storage
and memories collide permanently, with just one medium emerging for both
purposes. 3D XPoint isn't suitable for that role, at least not yet, but it could
help lay the groundwork." ...read
the article

"Much less easy to place within any particular
calendar year and to rate for its significance to future SSD history - however -
due to its distinctly vaporware-like aspects and stunning lack of technical
details - was the stage managed unveiling of a newly branded memory architecture
by Intel and Micron - which (like the emperor's new clothes) may or may not
become significant for enterprise applications in 2016, or 2017 or 2018 -
depending on when we can see it working and depending on what other competitors
are doing at that time."

Editor:- October 12, 2016 - Micron's long delayed
plan (announced in December
2015) to complete its ownership of Inotera now has an end
date in sight - December 6th, 2016.

Inotera
announced
yesterday Micron Semiconductor Taiwan Co. Ltd. and Inotera signed a syndicated
loan agreement of NT$80BN with a group of banks which will enable MST to
acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Inotera for
cash.

"We are
finding that U.S. federal agencies arent the only organizations that are
interested in the extra security these drives provide. Companies in health care
and financial services who face stiff fines for non-compliance and huge risks if
they have a data breach are adding FIPS 140-2 compliance to their requirements."
...read
the article

Editor:-
June 2, 2015 - 2 years after sampling its
first
16nm nand flash - which was 2D with MLC nodes (2 bits per cell) -
Micron today
announced
it has progressed to the next evolutionary step and is now shipping 16nm
(which is still 2D) but is now 3 bits per cell (TLC).

In both cases
the products were 16GB memory chips.

Micron says it believes that
TLC will account for almost 50% of the total NAND gigabytes shipped in 2015.

....

Micron is a less
threatening flash partner for many enterprise SSD companies to work with.

The
M500DC
SSDs - based on 20nm MLC NAND, and with capacities upto 800GB are fast-enough
65K / 24K R/W IOPS (4KB) rated at 1 to 3
DWPD for 5 years.

Editor's
comments:- the reason that flash memory makers get excited by such mundanely
performing SSDs - is that for every terabyte of fast sexy SSD they can sell in
the enterprise market there's another 2 to 50 more terabytes of "value"
class SSD capacity they can sell too - if they can get the price, power
consumption and reliability right (and not over specified).

"McObject (whose
products include in-memory database software) recently published the results of
benchmarks using AGIGA Tech's NVDIMM in which they did some unthinkable things
which you would never wish to try out for yourself - like rebooting the server
while it was running."

Editor:- July 16, 2013 - Micron today
announced
it will be in full production of 16nm nand flash (128Gb MLC memory devices)
in Q4 this year - and is designing SSDs around this process geometry - to ship
in 2014.

What does
this mean for other types of enterprise SSD? See the analysis in
SSD news.

..

We're #1 in SSD revenue -
says Micron

Editor:- March 7, 2013 - Micron sees itself as
the biggest SSD company - in terms of revenue, with about 6% market
share in enterprise SSD - according to Kipp A. Bedard,
VP Investor Relations - at a recent investors conference - transcribed in
an article on SeekingAlpha.com

"In terms of SSDs, if we specifically broke out our SSD
revenues, we'd probably be the largest SSD public company today. If I had to
guess, were probably running on a revenue basis somewhere around 80%, 85%
client, 15% to 20% enterprise"

The company today
announced
production of its new
P410m
SSD. This is (a 2.5"
SSD with R/W speeds upto 410MB/s and 345MB/s respectively and 50K/30K
R/W IOPS
for the 400GB model which uses 25nm MLC.
Endurance is
10 drive fills per day for 5 years.

Editor's comments:- Micron
is currently the only company manufacturing both
PCIe and
SAS compatible
enterprise SSDs in the 2.5" form factor.

The new solution has been selected as a key storage device in
Dell's PowerEdge 12th
generation servers.

Editor's comments:- this is a natural
progression - from the pioneering work last year by
SANRAD (the first
company to ship front removable PCIe SSDs) and
OCZ (the first company to
demonstrate 3.5"
PCIe SSDs).

Editor:- June 2, 2011 - 30
months after
pre-announcing
its intentions to enter the
PCIe SSD accelerator
market - Micron
today
announced
it is sampling the first products in a new family which will ship in the 3rd
quarter of this year.

The company says its
RealSSD
P320h drive delivers upto 750K / 341K R/W
IOPS, and
3GB/s / 2GB/s R/W throughput. It uses Micron's own 34nm SLC ONFI 2.1 NAND
flash and has on-board
RAM cache.
Micron says it manufactures most of the chips used in the new cards a
customized SSD controller.

Editor's comments:- if it lives up
to its promise - this new SSD range from Micron could be
among the fastest PCIe
SSDs around. From the viewpoint of a semiconductor memory maker - PCIe SSDs
are attractive because they have high added value. That's the theory. In
practise - to make an enterprise SSD business work you also have to invest a
lot in continuing technical design,
compatibility testing,
customer support and
marketing.

The true test of Micron's
new product therefore is not so much what it's like when it ships to users at
the end of this year - but whether Micron decides to stay the course 2 to 3
years down the road.